F
lntroduction
We are listening in the time ofthe cloud. First there was a person
making up a song, as ritual or warning or memorial. Toen there was a
person singing an old song that someone had made up. Toen there was
music in the church and the concert hall and bar and bordello; then the
wax cylinder, gramophone, radio, cassette, CD player, downloadable
digital file. And then there was the cloud. Now we can hear nearly
everything,* almost whenever, almost wherever, often for free: most of
the history ofWestern music anda lot of the rest.
Source: We know all that music is there. Sorne of us know, roughly, how to
encounter a lot of it. But once we hear it, how can we allow ourselves to
Ratliff, Ben. Every Song Ever. make sense of it? We could use new ways to find points of connection
New York, 2016 and intersection with all that inventory. We could use new features to
listen for and new filters to listen through. Even better if those features
"Can we really hear nearly everything? No. There is much more to the history of mu-
sic than what has been copyrighted, recorded, and negotiated for by media compa-
nies. And you should keep that in mind as you read this book. But the idea of
"everything" is true enough for us to feel its truth. Toe amount is hard to quantify-a
lot of music, in relation to what?-but its force is real. Even the most knowledgeable
don't know it ali, or even the full extent of it. We have reached the point that the Tao
Te Ching, in Arthur Waley's translation, describes: "the further one travels / the less
one knows."
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4 Every Song Ever lntroduction 5
and filters are generated more from the act of listening itself than from perform twenty times without paying admission or traveling any-
the vocabulary and grammar of the composer. where, through live streams on screens. If he finds his way to the right
free software, he can time-stretch a song while keeping it at the same
pitch, and turn its emotional experience upside-down, as has been done
Toe most significant progress in the recent history of music has to do to records by Justin Bieber and to the Jackson 5. He can fose elements
with listening. How we listen to music could be, for perhaps the first of two different songs-say, a Biggie Smalls rap anda children's television-
time in centuries, every bit as important to its history and evolution as show theme-and can learn, when boomeranging it through social
what the composer intends when writing it. media, that a lot of people (mostly young people) really, really like stark
By "how we listen to music" I am not referring to a change in our musical juxtapositions.
neural processing of music. (This is not a scientific book.) I mean a In the store where he bought his sneakers he might have heard a
change in how we build a conscious framework or a rationale to listen digital playlist on shuffle, playing a Don Ornar reggaeton track after a
to all kinds of music. Culture is built on ready availability, and we have Latin freestyle hit from the 1980s. On the bus, he can stream the same
suddenly switched from being a species that needed to recognize only a five Drake mp3s from the cloud without owning anything he's hearing,
few kinds of songs-because only a few kinds were readily available to or he can listen justas easily to recent field recordings of Saharan music,
us, through the radio, or through record stores, if we were lucky enough possibly made on a cell phone. At home, he can watch television shows
to live near one-to a species with direct and instant access to hundreds that use recorded music pulled from any tradition of the last hundred
of kinds, thousands of kinds, across culture and region and history. years in order to give extra meaning to a scene ora character; ifhe likes
Listeners have become much more powerful. Perhaps we should use what he hears, his cloud-based playlists might appear to follow no
that power to learn how to listen to everything. associative logic of sound or style. Later on, if he becomes more en-
Here's an image from real life. A teenage hoy, on a bus in the Bronx, gaged with music, he can-let's say-train as a violist and feel moderately
in a puffer vest and bright kicks and a close haircut, just old enough to sure that he will work with electronic-music composers or singer-
have figured out how to dress with authority, listening to a song by songwriters or Berklee-trained guitar improvisers or rappers from
Jeremih, phone to ear. Maybe he bought the song; more likely he found South Africa. He can walk out of whatever styles of music raised him,
a way to download it for free, or is streaming it from YouTube or Spot- and into others as yet unknown to him, where he has complete access
ify. Toe song is about luxuriant sex, as are most songs by Jeremih. Toe because listening gave it to him. He doesn't have to wait for music to
teenager listens with near boredom and absolute confidence. Toe posi- define him. He can define it.
tion of the phone in his palm, the angle ofhis hand and wrist, the focus Music is everywhere. It has gained on us as our waking life turns
ofhis eyes as he surrounds himself with the song's information-this is into one long broadcast, for better and for worse-often for worse. But
all part of his creativity. He is engaging, identifying with the song; we have gained on it, too, learning how and when we want to absorb
he has a sense of dominion over the song and the medium. He can take it. Toe unit of the album means increasingly little to us, and so the
that song or leave it. There are a million others like it. He's got the continent-sized ice floes of English-language culture that were Beatles
power. He's the great listener of now. and Michael Jackson records are melting into the water world of sound.
He can listen to more, or he can listen to less. He can hear a musician (Por efficiency we'll download just one song and ignore the other twelve,
6 Every Song Ever 1 ntroduction 7
but we could likely have them all for free: we have a new assumption and nationally, but physically: an oboe sounded like an oboe. A celesta
that music is ours to take, just as soon as it is ready to be sold to us.) sounded like a celesta. A viola like a viola. These machines had right and
We might get our cues about what to listen to from our Facebook feed, wrong ways to strike the ear. One understood those sounds by imagin-
or from sources that use music as almost neutral content in a medi- ing those instruments within an ensemble or orchestra arranged on
ated environment-talent shows, talk radio, football-game ad spots. stage and facing the audience. A certain language of rhythms and
Background-music services have been vastly improved, thanks to the harmonies, signposts and cues, became consensual within a culture.
information yielded by our online listening activity. Pandora's so-called But since and after the 1970s-when studio recording suddenly ad-
Genome recommendation model reminds us that there is more to be vanced beyond the limitation of eight tracks, synthesizers and then
heard within a similar style, based on that style's small or large charac- samples became common, and various extremes of volume or experi-
teristics. Other sophisticated music-data algorithms, such as those mentation in progressive rock and jazz and electronic music developed
created for Spotify and other clients by music-data companies like the their own traditions in popular culture-the listening experience
Echo Nest, profile your taste in music as a condition related to who you has been changing. You often don't know what you're hearing. Pierre
are in general-where you live, how old you are, how you are likely to Schaeffer, the French composer, saw that coming in the 1950s. "Toe les-
vote. With these advances we can essentially be fed our favorite meal sons of the linguists must be born in mind," Schaeffer wrote, speaking
repeatedly. We develop a relationship of trust with-what? Whom? A of the failure of Western notation to encompass all music. "A foreign
team of programmers? Our own tastes, whatever that means, trans- language cannot be reduced to the familiar patterns of our mother
lated into a data profile? tongue. We have no doubt that other civilizations probably have other
This all sounds very bad. It probably is very bad. Infinite access, instruments and other ideas, a solfege of their own, perhaps more re-
unused or misused, can lead to an atrophy of the desire to seek out new fined than ours."
songs ourselves, and a hardening of taste, such that all you want to do And that's what listening can be today: an encounter with civiliza-
is confirm what you already know. But there is possibly something very tions other than your own, perhaps on a daily or weekly basis, no mat-
good, too, about the constant broadcast and the powers of the shuflle ter who you are. Older listeners might feel it more intensely: having
and recommendation effects. There is a possibility that hearing so much grown up with predigital sounds, sorne feel that nearly everything they
music without specifically asking for it develops in the listener a fresh hear through the channels of popular culture is strange or even un-
kind of aural perception, an ability to size up a song and contextualize knowable. But even younger listeners feel something like this, too.
it in a new or personal way, rather than immediately rejecting it based Even if they've used Garageband, even if they've used digital editing
on an external idea of genre or style, It's what happens in the moment programs to make a YouTube video, they may still be disoriented by
of contextualization that matters: what you can connect it to, how you the intensity, the sounds and swells and curves, of a Max Martín or
make it relate to what you know. Maybach Music or DJ Mustard production, or all that flows from those
headwaters. Sounds are running ahead of our vocabularies for describ-
ing them. Oh, we have a general idea-those sounds come from digital
Toe old way of "correct'' listening involved more preconditioning. It sources-but perhaps we don't expect the frequencies of those sounds,
meant not only knowing where a piece of music carne from historically or how they will be arranged.
8 Every Song Ever lntroduction 9
Toe feelings of disorientation, of not knowing what process makes Drake, Bjórk, Arvo Part, Umm Kulthum, and the Beatles. They don't
what sound, of not really understanding what "producers" do, are ques- all come from one tradition, and their principles of form are different.
tion marks now built into our hearing. We have not been thinking so They're not all standing on one sheerly musical plane.
much about the old definable coordinates. We have been thinking, Perhaps those reasons for engagement could be articulated in a lan-
when we hear something that is new to us, more about affect and magic. guage that isn't specifically musical, or identified with composers and
We are redefining our terms every time a new piece of music arises players, as Copland would have wanted, but rather a language that
in the shuffie rotation, because there is a greater chance that we will refers to generalized human activity. Therefore, perhaps not "melody,"
be surprised by its juxtaposition with what carne before, if only in vol- "harmony," "rhythm," "sonata form," "oratorio." Perhaps, instead, repetí-
ume: the very loud mastering of the Black Eyed Peas, let's say, coming tion, or speed, or slowness, or density, or discrepancy, or stubbornness,
after the dun-colored restraint of a Waylon Jennings record from the or sadness. Intentionally, these are not musical terms per se. You know
mid-'70s. what repetition is even if you've never had the first thought about how
In many cases, having rapidly acquired a new kind of listening a song is written. You know because you experience it in your average
brain-a brain with unlimited access-we dig very deeply and very day or week. Why is it all right to categorize music this way? Because it
narrowly, creating bottomless comfort zones in what we have decided has to be all right. Music and life are inseparable. Music is part of
we like and trust. Or we shut clown, threatened by the endless choice. our physical and intellectual formation. Music moves: it can't do any-
Toe riches remain dumb unless we have an engaged relationship with thing else. Toe same goes for us. Everything has a tone and a pitch,
them. Algorithms are listening to us. At the very least we should try to and rhythms-or pulses, at least-surround us. We build an autobiog-
listen better than we are being listened to. raphy anda self-írnage with music, and we know, even as we're build-
ing them, that they're going to change. Most human beings impose
their wills on the world partly with and through music, even if they are
To a certain way of thinking, understanding Beethoven's or Bach's use not musicians. Toe way they hear-you can call it taste, if you want-is
of melody, harmony, rhythm, tone color, and compositional structure in how they move and work and dress and love.
might have taught you how to listen well in 1939, when Aaron Copland Repetition, for instance: repetition in music works best when the
published his popular book What to Listen far in Music. Copland called quality of repeated tones and their patterning remind you of breathing
this the "sheerly musical plane" oflistening-the state of being alive to or walking or running. Crucially, the effect of repetition depends not
what he called music's "actual musical material," "the principles of on one figure being repeated identically and unaccompanied, but on a
musical form." It was an ideal of listening according to an imagined relative change moving against a relative constant, which is really the
sense of what the composer would have wanted you to understand. key to life's riddle of time and gratification. Once you establish that,
But Beethoven and Bach, even combined-and great as they still are- you can hear it in a piece of music by Rihanna and then make connec-
do not prepare or condition you for the range of music that in 2015 is tions to other examples of musical repetition: James Brown, and Steve
already, or could easily be, part of your consciousness. It is up to you to Reich, and Cortijo y su Combo. All those entities may belong to different
come up with reasons for engaging as a listener that can encompass radio or streaming-service playlists. But so what? When the first order
Beethoven and Bach as well as Beyoncé, Hank Williams, John Coltrane, of business is to sort music out by genre or structure or language-to
1O Every Song E ver lntroduction 11
determine whether a song is indie-folk or classical or R&B or nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, speculated all
whatever-that's a direct route to the bottomless comfort zone. the time. In How to Listen to Music: Hints and Suggestions to Untaught
And so, back to the question. We can listen to nearly anything, at any Lovers of the Art, from 1897, he wrote statements such as "the lifeblood
time. How are we going to get to it? How are we going to access it, of music is melody," or "the vile, the ugly, the painful are not fit sub-
and how can we listen to it with purpose-meaning, how can we pay jects for music." Sorne might only partially agree with him now. Sorne
just enough attention to it so that it could change our lives? And again: would say he was entirely wrong.
How are we going to listen better than we are being listened to? I am not going to give you an algorithm for finding new music to
This book is a series of essays about different things to listen for in know and love. It's not my business to anticípate what you might like.
music, now that the circumstances have changed since Copland's time. I am suggesting a strategy of openness, and a spirit in which to hear
Nobody can lave everything, of course; the urgent thing, now that we things that may have been kept away from you. Toe suggestions I'm of-
have so much catching up to do, seems to be how to access a strategy of fering for how to hear are based on certain kinds of aflinities between
openness, a spirit of recognition. It means rolling the microscope back pieces of music. Toe aflinities are not based in genre, because genre is a
from issues of form and genre to find general associative qualities that construct for the purpose of commerce, not pleasure, and ultimately
have to do with the actual experience of listening, such that you might for the purpose oflistening to less. (I sometimes use words and phrases
perform your own version of "If you like X, you'll like Y," in which X that have to do with formal structure and genre in this book, but where
and Y may have been conceived centuries apart, for totally different it is possible I try not to. Most of all, I am trying not to use those terms
audiences, and yet they're both in front of us, equally accessible. I am at- as boundaries orto confer value.) This book is about listening for plea-
tempting to respond to a situation of total, overwhelming, glorious plenty. sure, and about listening to more.
This new kind of thinking about listening-if it is new-will be specu-
lative and somewhat subjective. It uses "I," "we," and "you" in a gener-
alized way. (Of course, the "we" might have a little more to do with me
than you, and the "you" might also have little to do with you. It's a
rhetorical conceit.) It talks about sorne very simple notions, such as
repetition, and a few that are more abstract and intuitive, such as what
I call "linking," and that might require a little more squinting and
imagining on the part of the reader. Listening-reacting to music and
putting yourself in its spaces-is an abstract and intuitive job.
But no reaction to music is universal. Toe old way, of learning to
listen through the lessons and aims of the composers, could be specu-
lative, too. Toe journalist and music-appreciation writer Henry Kreh-
biel, a democratizing force for general audiences around the end of the
